Daysider

Chapter 11

With a wordless snarl, Damon worked one arm free and went for his knife. Lysander caught his wrist and bent it back at an unnatural angle. Something cracked under Damon’s skin, but his mask of blind rage never faltered.

“Do it now!” Lysander shouted, sinking his teeth into Damon’s neck.

Alexia almost shot him. Once she wouldn’t have hesitated to sacrifice an enemy agent in order to eliminate a murderous leech. But Damon was no longer just an enemy agent, and the risk to him was too great. She threw the VS as far away as she could, took off her pack and kicked it away, and then removed her knife and pistol and did the same with them.

“Let him go,” she ordered.

Lysander raised his head and laughed, his teeth stained with Damon’s blood. “I never said I would let him go, only that I would not leave him a bloodless husk.” He released Damon’s wrist, grabbed his knife and ripped the sheath from Damon’s belt. “You should run, little Half-blood, before I am tempted to sample the wares that make your kind so valuable to ours.”

Damon howled and heaved under Lysander, gaining just enough space to jam his knee into the Nightsider’s crotch. Lysander reared back and slashed his long fingernails across Damon’s face, incising four deep gashes in Damon’s cheek, jaw and chin. He bent and licked the welling blood from Damon’s face. The Daysider’s body began to jerk as if in a seizure, his eyes rolling back in his skull.

The odds had just gone from bad to worse, and Alexia was responsible. She moved closer to Lysander, spreading her hands as if begging a truce.

“The orders you gave Damon said that he was supposed to escort me back to the Border,” she said. “Are you defying the Council you claim to serve?”

Lysander raised his head, Damon’s blood glistening on his lips. “I have seen his strange affection for you, little Half-blood,” he said. “I will merely be saving the Council the trouble of hunting him down after he turns traitor and defects.”

“Defects?” Alexia laughed derisively. “He hates the Enclave as much as any of you.”

“And he knew when he attacked me that I would kill him. Irrational impulses, remember?”

“If you kill him,” Alexia said, “you’ll have to kill me, too. And if you think Aegis won’t investigate—”

“They will be too busy dealing with more important matters than the loss of one operative.”

She took another step. “I don’t think you work for the Council at all,” she said. “I think you’re the traitor.”

Lysander curled his fingers around Damon’s throat and dug his nails into the skin. The Daysider choked, and fresh blood soaked the collar of his shirt.

“Alexia,” Damon said, his voice a bubbling whisper. “Run. Tell them—” Alexia hurled herself at Lysander, less concerned about doing damage than breaking up the lethal embrace. Without turning, Lysander batted at her as if she were an annoying insect and sent her flying. She rolled to her feet, sucking air into her lungs as she prepared to attack again.

But she’d broken the deadlock, and Damon was already moving. Blood spattered the ground and Lysander’s face as Damon wrenched his arms up and broke the Nightsider’s hold. Suddenly it was as if Damon had never been compromised at all, and Lysander was falling back, crouching with an incredulous expression on his face.

Then Damon was on him again, a whirlwind that could cut down everything in its path.

It was a ruthless, brutal fight, but the Nightsider was almost completely on the defensive now, quivering prey caught between the deadly claws of Damon’s relentless predator. Each of Damon’s blows was precisely aimed to do the most damage, and soon Lysander was scrambling away, intent only on survival.

Alexia knew they couldn’t let him go. She ran to retrieve the VS and spun around to find Damon with his teeth sunk into Lysander’s shoulder. The Nightsider screamed.

“Damon!” she shouted. “Get out of the way!”

He maintained his hold, biting harder, and Lysander began to flail like a madman, his eyes vivid with terror. Alexia knew Damon wasn’t hearing her, wasn’t feeling anything but the implacable need to kill.

And she had to stop him. She had no idea if Damon had ever killed anyone before, but this wasn’t simply a matter of self-defense. This was the kind of bloodthirstiness Enclave soldiers and civilians had witnessed in rampaging vampires at the end of the War, when the leeches had finally realized they had lost their bid to enslave all humanity. Alexia knew in her heart that if Damon killed Lysander this way, like a beast—like an Orlok—

he could never fully return to what he had been.

It was up to her to finish it. She was more than ready.

She advanced another meter, keeping the Vampire Slayer aimed at whatever part of Lysander she could see. “Damon,” she said. “You’ve won. Let me take care of this.”

Lysander rolled his eyes in her direction. “Stop,” he gasped, blood foaming around his lips. “I will—” Damon pulled back and struck the Nightsider across the face, and Alexia knew the only way she could stop him was to hurt him. She hesitated, holding the VS tight against her side, drew her knife and threw it directly at Damon’s shoulder.

It bit through his bloodstained jacket into flesh, and Damon twisted to slap the knife away, his face streaked with blood like war paint. His eyes focused on Alexia, and she saw in him more than fury, more than hatred, more than the intensity of will that had driven him to keep her safe no matter what the cost.

It was the way Michael had looked at her the last time. The rage, the loss, the profound sorrow.

With a high-pitched scream, Lysander lunged up to clamp his teeth around Damon’s neck. Damon felt behind him for the knife he had tossed aside, snatched it up and buried the blade in Lysander’s back.

The two men broke apart, Lysander scraping his hand across his back in an effort to remove the knife, Damon shaking the blood from his throat and prepared to strike the final blow.

Alexia ran to the side, searching for a clear shot to Lysander’s head or chest. Any other part of his body and the projectile might not kill him. But if she hit Damon instead—

Something moved on the edge of her vision, a tall, almost spindly shape that darted toward the combatants before she could alter her aim. It lifted Damon by his shoulder with one skeletal hand and tossed him a good three meters away. Then it grabbed Lysander and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. Alexia heard the Nightsider’s neck snap.

The Orlok met her gaze. Safe, it said in her mind.

She ran for Damon and dropped to her knees beside him. He was dazed and injured, but sanity was returning to his eyes, and when he looked at her it was with the bewilderment of a man who miraculously survived a fatal accident. His wounds, even the deep punctures and slashes in his neck and face, had stopped bleeding, and Alexia quickly returned her attention to the dead Nightsider and the creature that stood above him.

Michael.

The Orlok released its hold on Lysander’s hair, red now rather than white, and started toward her. Damon scrambled into a crouch, moving stiffly as he put himself between her and the Orlok.

“It’s all right,” Alexia whispered. “He won’t hurt us.”

“He?” Damon asked, blinking the blood from his eyes.

She continued to hold Michael’s gaze, so heavy with grief that she thought her heart would break.

Thank you, she thought, hoping Michael would hear her.

The Orlok inclined his head and began to shuffle backward, away from her and the Nightsider he had killed for her sake. And perhaps, even, for Damon’s.

Don’t go, she thought. Let me help you.

“Sires’ blood,” Damon swore hoarsely. “It knows you.”

Michael’s stare swung toward Damon. Alexia heard nothing, but suddenly Damon’s face went blank with astonishment. He began to rise, but Michael melted away into the shrubbery, and Alexia knew he was gone.

Half stunned by the bizarre and violent turn of events, Alexia turned back to Damon, who was sinking down again.

“Hold still,” she commanded. He obeyed, still staring after Michael, as she pulled his blood-saturated jacket away from his skin and helped him remove it, taking care not to jog his broken wrist any more than necessary. She knew he was completely back to normal by the way he winced, ever so slightly, at her gentle probing of his neck and shoulder wounds.

“What in the Human Hell just happened?” he asked hoarsely.

Alexia let out a long breath and closed her eyes. “What do you remember?” she asked.

“I was...fighting Lysander,” he said.

Alexia almost laughed. She opened her eyes and found herself staring at Damon’s neck. Even though the bleeding had stopped, the smell of blood— his blood—was ripe in the air, so strong she could taste it.

She swallowed and looked at Lysander’s broken body. She could smell his blood, too, but it had no effect on her at all.

Damon’s blood. God help her.

As if he had guessed the course of her thoughts, Damon raised a finger from his good hand to brush at the deepest wounds in his neck.

“Leave that alone,” Alexia snapped, slapping his hand back down. “Let it heal.” She swallowed again, trying to ignore the bitterness on her tongue. “What else do you remember?”

“Almost nothing, except he...threatened you,” Damon said, spitting the last few words through his teeth. His skin began to flush with fresh anger. “Alexia—”

“Easy,” Alexia said, lightly touching the uninjured part of his arm. “Do you remember how the fight started?”

“I...think I started it,” he said. He covered his mouth with a bloody hand.

“Something...went wrong. I should have forced him to tell us—” He broke off again and raised his head. “What did I do, Alexia?”

She didn’t know how to answer the agony in his voice, the knowledge that he had to ask someone else what he’d done because his memory was a blank. He saw the blood on himself, on Lysander, and still he didn’t realize how he had transformed, become something for which Alexia had no name or explanation.

“You kept him from trying to kill us,” she said simply.

He glanced at her and quickly looked away, his torn face drawn with confusion and pain.

She needed him clearheaded after all this. She needed to be clearheaded, and it wasn’t going to be easy. There were too many issues clamoring for her attention, including finding out where Damon’s “spells” were coming from and what to do about them. If anything could or should be done about them.

“The Lamia,” Damon said suddenly, catching her off guard. “Why did it kill Lysander, and not us? Have you seen it before?”

“No,” she replied, lying before she could think about it.

“But it recognized you.” Damon worked his body into a crouch that brought his face very close to hers. “How is that possible?”

Alexia knew she was going to have to tell Damon about what had happened to Michael and what he’d said to her, but not here. Not now.

“I don’t know,” she said, reaching down to help Damon to his feet. Still cradling his broken wrist close to his chest, he limped over to the double agent’s body.

“Do you know him?” she asked.

“I may have seen him once in Erebus, but I do not recognize him as a Council operative.” He turned his gaze to Lysander. “Few Darketans have ever attacked an Opir and lived, and none has ever killed one.”

“But you didn’t kill him,” Alexia said, coming up behind him. “And anyway, this one deserved it.”

His shoulders rose and fell in a heavy sigh. “I would have killed him if you hadn’t interfered.”

Alexia refused to take his words as a reproach. He couldn’t be thinking straight yet.

She touched his bare shoulder lightly. “We should go now. We don’t know who, or what, might be attracted to the smell of blood.”

“Yes.” He examined both bodies with a slight frown. “We will attempt to make it appear as though the Opiri were fighting each other,” he said.

“They were fighting each other,” Alexia said. “It was just pretty one-sided.”

“Then we must hope that we do a convincing job of suggesting they were more evenly matched.” He reached for Lysander’s body with his good hand. Alexia got in his way.

“Maybe you should leave moving them to me,” she said. “Your wrist is broken, and you’ve lost a lot of blood.”

She was waiting for his response not only because she was worried about him pushing himself, but because she wanted to see if he’d react to her mention of losing blood.

Lysander had suggested he would need nourishment soon, and that worried her greatly.

Damon hadn’t reacted at the time, so maybe Lysander had been trying to scare her just for the hell of it, figuring she would be threatened by the idea of Damon taking her blood. And the Daysider hadn’t made any attempt to actually drink any of Lysander’s blood, which would have made perfect sense if he were in need.

“I’m fine,” Damon said. “These wounds aren’t as bad as they look.” He smiled, a wry expression obviously meant to reassure her. “As long as I can avoid another fight within the next few hours, I will recover.”

“Damon—” He turned his back on her, and Alexia realized he wasn’t going to accept her help, let alone admit that he needed rest and nourishment. While she gathered up her pack, the weapons and the scraps of red-dyed cloth shed in the battle, Damon arranged the bodies, wiped the handle of his knife on his pants and put the weapon in the first Nightsider’s hand.

He stood up, scraping the back of his good hand across his face without taking notice of the still-raw gashes. “Anyone who comes is going to know an Orlok’s been here, anyway,” he said. He glanced sideways at Alexia. “That was unbelievable luck.”

She didn’t rise to the bait. “What about the clothes you’re still wearing?” she asked, dropping the wad of bloodstained fabric at her feet. “They’re saturated. If you think someone might find the bodies and come looking for us, you’ll have to do something about them. You’ll leave a trail even a human could find.”

Immediately Damon went to work on his belt. Hard muscle bunched and flexed under the night-pale skin of Damon’s arms, chest and ridged stomach as he stripped one-

handed out of his trousers and underwear and bundled them into a loose ball, setting them on the ground beside the wad of bloodstained cloth Alexia had gathered. He bent to remove his boots, tied the shoelaces together—not an easy task with only one working arm—and placed his socks on top of the rest of his clothing.

“Do you have a lighter?” he asked.

Alexia bent to her pack and opened one of the many small interior pockets. She withdrew a pen-size lighter made to quick start a fire for cooking or any other use an operative might require in the field.

“Burn the clothes,” he said.

“The smoke—” she began, trying not to look at his naked body in all its magnificent splendor.

“It isn’t likely to make the situation more dangerous than it already is. Do you have any water left?”

“A little.” She handed him her canteen, still averting her gaze, and crouched to set fire to the clothing. Damon had kept a relatively unstained strip of his pants, which he wetted down with the remaining water and used to wash the blood off his skin.

It was a hopeless task—there was too much blood and not nearly enough water. But when the fire was going and Alexia glanced up again, Damon no longer looked like the walking dead.

She gripped the lighter tightly in her fist, doing her best to pretend Damon wasn’t there at all. After everything that had happened since she’d woken up to find she’d taken his blood, when she’d been so angry with him and so disgusted with herself, she shouldn’t have been capable of admiring the powerful symmetry of Damon’s body, the way even his slightest move evoked the grace of a hunting beast in its natural environment.

He had been a beast, all right. She ought to remember that, and not be thinking of how much she wanted to touch that body, soothe his injuries, press up against him and feel his big hands on her—

“We’ll have to get fresh water soon,” Damon said, gazing in the direction of camp as if he were totally oblivious of her stare and the thoughts behind it.

“When we know we’re not being hunted,” Alexia said, watching the flames consume Damon’s clothing.

He tossed the cleaning rag into the fire. Alexia rose, brushing dirt off the knees of her pants.

“Do you have a spare set of clothes?” she asked.

He picked up his boots and slung the tied laces over his shoulder. “In my pack back at camp,” he said.

Busying herself with her own pack, Alexia clipped on her empty canteen and made sure everything was in place again. Then she kicked the ashes of the fire, mingled with blackened scraps of cloth, into the dirt and thoroughly covered both. The burned smell did a good job of obscuring Damon’s scent, and hers.

If only disposing of all their other problems could be so easy. How this was all going to end—how she was going to settle things with Damon, and with herself—she didn’t know. The only thing she could still be sure of was her duty to protect the Enclave, its people and all humanity.

And perhaps she could be certain of one other thing: Damon’s commitment to her, which she could no longer deny. But just how deep was hers to him? When it really came down to it, how could she deal with his violently unpredictable shadow-side, and the knowledge that he refused to consider turning on his Opir masters in spite of his treatment at their hands?

If—when—they found themselves on opposite sides again...

“Are you ready?” Damon asked, glancing back at the bodies one last time.

“Wait a minute,” Alexia said. She pulled her own spare shirt out of her pack and rigged it into a sling, gingerly slipping it over Damon’s shoulder and easing his broken wrist into the cradle of cloth. “That should hold you until it heals.” He looked at her hand lingering on his shoulder and then met her gaze. “Thank you,” he murmured.

Hastily Alexia dropped her hand and stepped back. “Let’s go,” she said.

Damon fell in beside her, and they set off for the temporary hilltop camp, moving in a random zigzag pattern to throw off potential pursuit and listening to every rustle of leaf and patter of tiny feet as birds and animals fled their approach. Naked as he was, Damon seemed little more than a ghost, sometimes ahead of her, sometimes behind, his skin absorbing what moonlight reached them as they kept to any cover they could find.

The deceptive quiet made what they found halfway back to the camp an ugly shock.

Damon stopped abruptly, head lifted, and gestured to Alexia. Within seconds she smelled what he had, and the two of them crept under the trees to the source of the stench.

The first corpse was a Daysider, his head nearly severed from his body, a pool of black blood soaking the earth underneath. Alexia guessed he’d been dead for at least six hours, probably longer. Damon crouched beside the body and touched the Daysider’s shoulder, his jaw clenched hard.

Alexia knew it was too risky to speak, so she let Damon examine the body and then went with him to find the second one. It lay a good dozen meters away—a female Nightsider, dressed in vampire daygear. Her helmet was missing, leaving her beautiful face exposed. A rash of burns pocked her skin, but they were not as severe as those of the double agent. She had been killed before the sun could complete its work, and the large, scorched hole in the chest of her suit made clear how she had died.

Damon studied her for a few moments, nodded to Alexia, and set off again. Neither of them spoke; there was far too much to say, and they were still in a very vulnerable position. By the time they reached camp—which was untouched, and still apparently safe —Alexia had managed to sort a dozen questions into some semblance of order.

She wiped her dry mouth with the back of her hand and paced in a circle around the hilltop, VS at the ready, trying to steady her emotions and buy a little more time while Damon dropped his pack and began unfolding his spare set of clothes. He seemed as reluctant to begin the conversation as she was.

“Who were they?” she asked at last.

“Council operatives,” he said, laying a neatly folded shirt, pants and socks on the top of his pack. His voice held no emotion, but Alexia had begun to learn how to read in it what might not be evident to anyone else.

He was angry, perhaps even grieved that his fellow agents had been slaughtered. It didn’t take much guesswork to figure out who was responsible.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “Lysander?”

“He wasn’t the only one.”

That wasn’t a very comforting answer, but it didn’t surprise her, either. God knew how many of them were running around the area now, setting up their little scheme to wipe out the colony.

Busy killing any and all opposition they could find.

“Did you know them?” she asked.

He gave short nod.

“Were they the other agents you mentioned when we met?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think they were looking for enemy operatives when they were killed?”

“It is possible.”

Alexia knew he wasn’t going to say anything more about it, at least for the time being.

And they were still in grave danger.

Alexia’s grim reflections were cut short by Damon’s next words. “You should never have left camp alone,” he said.

The tension, uncertainty and violence of the past few hours had left Alexia with only the merest thread of control to hang on to, and now it snapped.

“Did you expect me to ask for your permission?” she demanded.

He stood up abruptly, his clean pants hanging from his good hand. “If you had been hurt—”

“Who was Lysander?” Alexia interrupted, taking the offensive. “What was between you two that made you hate each other so much?”

Damon jerked on the pants one leg after the other, testing the tough fabric to its limits.

“Lysander is—” he reached down for his shirt and shook it out “—was,” he corrected himself, “a midrank Freeblood with ambition. And a traitor to the Council.”

A Freeblood...one of the four basic ranks in Nightsider society, and the second lowest.

Freebloods were no longer vassal to any Bloodmaster or Bloodlord, but they had yet to establish households with serfs of their own, and so competition among them was particularly fierce.

“You didn’t know he was a traitor when you first found us, did you?” she asked. “You obviously wanted to kill him the moment you laid eyes on him, and he felt the same, whatever he was trying to achieve by lying to us.”

Damon crumpled the shirt in his good hand. “He would have behaved the same with any Darketan.”

“Maybe. But before you showed up, Lysander tried to convince me that he killed the other Nightsider because you had a personal grudge against the Expansionists that would make you believe what his victim said about not trusting him. But Lysander must have known all along that you’d never believe anything he said.” She lowered her voice. “He mentioned Eirene. What happened, Damon? How was he involved?”

Fabric hissed as it tore in Damon’s fists. He stared down at the damage he had done to his spare shirt—and undoubtedly to his wrist, which he had pulled out of its sling—

before letting the garment fall to the ground.

Alexia tried again.

“Lysander said you were more driven by ‘irrational impulses’ than others of your kind. That that was why you were sent to work with me. What made him say that, Damon? What does it have to do with what you and I discussed before, about Darketans and feelings?”

His flat expression told her he wasn’t going to let her break him down. “We have far more important matters to discuss,” he said, “if we want to stay alive.”

He was right. She couldn’t waste time and energy trying to drag the truth out of him now, especially since there was one particular thing she had needed to know ever since she’d left camp late that morning. A question only Damon could answer.

Which was why she was alive at all.